Yikes. There's a lot going on here.Originally Posted by Enesta
Some aspects of this deck are absolute nightmares to play against, but luckily their Chalice/Thorn plan matters way less against us than against blue decks.
Random Thoughts:
Phyrexian Revoker is probably your best card, and if you are down to 2 like a lot of people (including me) then that will hurt. If there is a lot of this deck running around you will want to pump those numbers up. I think you almost have to name Walking Balista with the first copy, despite the fact that Steel Overseer is a very juicy name, as are Mox Opal and Ravager. Balista will come down and merc the Revoker anyway so I would err on the side of just preemptively turning him off. It is their best card in the matchup by a lot.
Make sure to get good value off of Flickerwisp. It will likely do a lot of dying to Balistas and Thopter Tokens, but the blink ability kills Hangerbacks and Chalice. Be sure to keep in mind that resetting a Chalice to 0 is actively excellent, because they are playing 7 zero mana mana rocks.
Your Swords to Plowshares end up very taxed. Being able to bring in some Paths and Judgments from the side will help a lot. I think you have to prioritize Steel Overseer because he gets very out of hand, but there are multiple threats that demand answers. Against Modern Affinity I am fine throwing Fatal Pushes at Vault Skirge on turn one, but against this deck I think you really need to wait to go after a more heavy hitter.
Mother of Runes is hot, hot garbage and is probably the first card you take out, but don't forget that Vault Skirge is black and will often be their only flyer. Might be able to sneak in with a Flickerwisp for Jitte counters.
Thalia is better than normal in a matchup like this because of their mana artifacts and first strike, but still fairly sketchy. Weak to Karakas hurts as well. ]
If they get their best draw against you it will be tough to beat, but can fight well on a few angles. Port and Wasteland are very good, and if you can point your Plows, Revokers, and Flickerwisps in the right directions then you can fight pretty well.
Cards you may want to look at for slots if this is a matchup you see a lot:
Serra Avenger: evasion and 3 toughness
Thalia, Heretic Cathar: slowing down their mana is the big plus. helps you make more aggressive moves and connect with equipment, and is a big first-striker
Eldrazi Displacer: invalidates big portions of their deck.
Kataki, War's Wage is a card I had a feeling was going to become good again.
@enesta
I wouldn't worry about this matchup too much. The deck seems very clunky (and is also a marginal percentage of the metagame). Some of their draws are beyond bonkers, but often enough, disrupting one key piece of their hand is enough to get a win. I fear walking Ballista out of that deck (and to a lesser extent Steel Overseer), but most of the other cards can be dealt with easily enough given our equipment suite and superior end game.
Mengucci ran through a league with the deck and there are a couple of videos floating around on Reddit about the deck as well if you are looking to see the deck in action a bit more.
Just a heads up that I ran into a Miracles player who had a Null Rod in their sideboard in last night's leagues. I was not expecting that, and it was pretty devastating.
I also like the meme value of "if our artifact gets banned then no one gets to activate their artifacts."
Been playing around with Red/White Taxes a whole bunch, and I've been trying to figure which build I like best. I've made a couple of earlyish observations and wanted to see if anyone else had come to similar conclusions
Orzhov Pontiff and Councils Judgement sort of share sideboard space, in being answers to True-Name Nemesis. When I was running them together, I found them coming in as a group far more than needing one or the other.
Running Pontiff without a Scrubland can be quite awkward. It ups your black sources from 3+4 Vials to 8 or 9+4 vials.
The manabase seems to be pretty figured out, but 3 port 5 fetch vs 4 port 4 fetch seems to be a topic for debate. I've found the mana to be a fair amount worse than in mono-white. What are the arguments for both sides?
Everyone seems to be cutting the fourth Flickerwisp. Is it insane to run it in one of my flex slots? I'm trying 1 Prelate main right now in that spot.
Sideboarding against control, there are a lot of different ways you approach the different control archetypes. Running the 3rd path seems good, but its definitely cut down on the number of slots that I can dedicate to control hate. Right now I'm on 1 Recruiter, 1 Cataclysm and 1 SoLaS. The Cataclysm slot I'm a little unsure if its good or worth running without Flagstones, and as a 1 of I don't get a huge amount of casts off. Whats everyones opinion on how to sideboard here? I've found Mirran Crusader, while still solid, to be more and more lackluster as more Pile players are running ways to deal with him. He went from the maindeck, to the sideboard, to cut altogether in my build.
Dire-Fleet Daredevil certainly brings some tension to the deck, but its been mostly a pretty solid card.
yea ive been doin the same 1+1 split but im testing if 2 magus main is better atm (2 pontiffs in side then obv )
concerning the port vs plains problem: yea i have noticed the same. i have tried solving this by playing only 3 flickerwisp + another human in earlier versions. but this doesnt help with casting CJ and Gideon. ill give it a shot. but i really like my ports ;)
thanks for your answer !
So if you didn't watch my stream last night, you need to watch a minute or so of this. Probably one of the more memorable moments of my stream so far.
@Medea_
That. Was. Sweet.
Are you back on Resto???
@redtwister
I 5-0'd with one in my sb.
How impactful was Resto (obviously, a small sample size)?
Resto is fine. It's been good pretty much every time I have drawn it.
Glad I was able to talk you into the Resto :)
So now I want to share a nice story from last FNM :)
I was on with Wr build and it was preboard against mono red:
He won dice and got tunr 1 blood moon ... so my fetch and rest was kinda red.
Got vial out, pass.
Goes on for a while , I got my first plain after vial on 3 . flickering moon and fetch
After getting a bit on board (plan was getting lethal and flickering bridge) but then 2 fiery confluecne . hitting board and my vial.
Only geft with a mother equip sword and batterskull with token.
Top decking Daredevil ... snapping fiery back to get away the bridge and lethal :P
(Only got 2 round left against 2 chandras)
:) Was the only moment I was realy happy to have dardevil , but to be honest he can be awsome but also can be not so ...
Othertime he won me a game because he got firststrike against eldrazi preboard.
After watching Medea's last two streams (Thanks so much for recording those, Medea!!), I'm testing WR Taxes and I'm torn on the flex slots. Where he is running Wingmare, I have a soft spot for Mirran Crusader -- sometimes I just like to turn them creatures sideways. I'm also testing out the Resto Angel in the other 4-slot. My list currently looks like:
3 Flickerwisp
4 Mother of Runes
2 Phyrexian Revoker
2 Recruiter of the Guard
4 Stoneforge Mystic
4 Thalia, Guardian of Thraben
2 Magus of the Moon
2 Mirran Crusader
1 Pia and Kiran Nalaar
1 Restoration Angel
4 Swords to Plowshares
4 Aether Vial
1 Batterskull
1 Sword of Fire and Ice
1 Umezawa’s Jitte
1 Rest in Peace
3 Cavern of Souls
3 Karakas
3 Plains
3 Plateau
3 Rishadan Port
4 Wasteland
2 Flooded Strand
3 Windswept Heath
Sideboard:
2 Ethersworn Canonist
3 Path to Exile
3 Rest in Peace
2 Containment Priest
1 Leonin Relic-Warder
1 Cunning Sparkmage
1 Pia and Kiran Nalaar
2 Cataclysm
Questions: If I'm not running two fliers in the Crusader slots, would I rather have Flickerwisp #4 than one of the Crusaders? Especially considering I'm running Resto Angel. Or do I really want the Wingmares? I haven't historically been a Wingmare person even though I know some people swear by them. I miss all of the fliers in the old days of 4 Wisp, 3 Avenger, 2 Mindcensor Mono-W builds when it seemed like 9 fliers was a minimum.
Or maybe do a 1 Crusader, 1 Wingmare split?
@copperhead
I think it's important to have something in the maindeck to hate on combo. I'm currently opting for Wingmare over Prelate. Wingmare is better in multiples and solves the deck's issues of being a little flier-light. It's also only a single white vs the WW of other options like Wisp #4.
hey guys!
Would you keep or add Sanctum Prelate against Grixis Delver?
Copperhead, this post is not a criticism of your decklist specifically, but your list is a great jumping off point for a specific issue I've seen a lot in high-level magic deckbuilding.
I get that the mana is bad, so people are cutting a Flickerwisp. I disagree, but I get it.
But the mana is even worse for Cataclysm. We have stressed our manabase so much that we don't even feel confident in a 1WW creature that is helped out by Vial.
The thing that's truly dangerous here is we aren't going to draw these 1WW and 2WW sideboard cards often enough for us to "feel" the percentages. We won't see these cards in our hand often enough to groan when they fail more than they should. So we are more susceptible to anti-scientific thought on this issue. Well-meaning people will say things like
These same types of anti-logic could be used the same way for Flickerwisp, but we aren't so susceptible to antilogic with Flickerwisp because we have all felt the misery of having uncastable Flickerwisps in our hand multiple times. So if someone says "I haven't had a problem..." or "I don't need it on 3 anyway..." we can instinctively go "OK but math says you are wrong" and we also critically have the bad feelings to back up our position.
- "I've never had a problem casting them (implied: I do not have enough data to make a conclusion, so this choice is a matter of opinion.)"
- "I don't need the WW spells on curve anyway (implied: the goalposts of 'castable' can always be moved to make my decision defensible)"
- "You have to run hot to win a tournament anyway (implied: there is randomness in magic, so we should not think critically about any choices)"
So I guess I'm saying that if one of the reasons we are down on Flickerwisp is because of the mana, then we should definitely be at least as down on noncreature spells that are even worse for the mana, and we need to be careful that we aren't using sneaky mind tricks on ourselves. We don't have time to collect enough emotional data to get a bad feeling about sideboard WW spells, so we should be more critical of our reasons to include them.
Prelate is devastatingly good against delver. Takes this list for example: http://mtgtop8.com/event?e=18363&d=314016&f=LE
Post side, she still neuters a third of the cards in their deck. Huang's list in particular has no good way of dealing with her once she has resolved. Some people may play answers in the side like Kolaghan's Command, Grim Lavamancer, Abrade or Fire Covenant, but that's still only a select few cards that might answer her while all of their cantrips are shut down. And it's an extra reason to bring in another prelate if you have it.
The main downside is that she also keeps you from casting your best removal spells, so you might be blown out by delver or angler aggro. But our flyers are almost guaranteed to trade with their delvers if their removal spells are shut down, or better if we have mom. Our deck is stocked with chump blockers for angler, including mirran crusader, and the disruption of prelate reduces the efficiency of delve considerably because their cantrips are truly stuck in hand. They're also not as likely to find their artifact removal without their cantrips, making the odds of our (often) insta-win equipment connecting better
Prelate seems more sketchy if you run 3 paths in the side, but I think that's more a weakness of this removal plan than of prelate herself. They shine against delver and lands, but they're much more awkward to use against decks like ur delver, stompy (eldrazi, steel, merfolk), the mirror, reanimator, depths or infect.
I board out Prelate vs Delver decks.
Regarding Cataclysm: I think the "you don't want to cast it on curve argument" is a good one for Cataclysm in particular, though a weak argument more generally. Against most of the decks where I want Cataclysm, I am wanting to cast it *very* late. Realistically I probably mean turn 8 or 10. Against decks like Miracles and Czech pile, you try to win the game via fair means, and once that plan fails and they've made a bunch of land drops or dropped a Jace, it's time to Cataclysm. At that point, getting non-creature WW is totally reasonable.
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